Sex, Art, and the Dow Jones attempts to extract a certain number of aesthetic topics from their historic contexts (art and film history) in order to connect them to the restructuring currently going on in our society. Even today, questions from the 1980s appear to have linking components – a phenomenon occurring within anthropology, politics, and sociology, as well as in the aesthetic context.

How can the events in which we are supposed to participate be translated into experience? How can we represent ourselves in a History that is being written in terms of the economy and the stock market? Along these questions, French author Jean-Charles Massera discusses the works of various artists (Vito Acconci, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, et al.) and film-makers (Jean-Luc Godard, Wong Kar-wai, Nanni Moretti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, et al.).

Jean-Charles Massera is a writer and art critic based in Paris and Berlin. He is the author of “The Lesson of Stains (Towards an aesthetics of reconstitution)”, published in Pierre Huyghe. The Third Memory (Centre Georges Pompidou/Renaissance Society), United Emmerdements of New Order preceded by United Problems of Coût de la Main d’Oeuvre (P.O.L), a cauchemar is born (verticales), Jean de La Ciotat, la légende (verticales) as well as plays, radio fictions and catalogue essays.

Translated from the French by Gila WalkerDesign by Surface, Berlin/Frankfurt am Main